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(The below TheaterByte screen captures are lightly compressed with lossy JPEG at 100% quality setting and are meant as a general representation of the content. They do not fully reveal the capabilities of the Blu-ray format)

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The Film

[Rating:4.5/5]

America has long been fascinated by criminal couples like Bonnie and Clyde, antiheroes of a very successful 1967 film with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Badlands is a reprise of this theme but with a twist as the couple, Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) seem too young and innocent to become mass murderers. Kit, an out of work “troubled youth” becomes infatuated with teenager Holly and, against the wishes of her father (Warren Oates) whom he later shoots in cold blood, takes her with him on a killing spree. Although writer/director Terrence Malick denied that Badlands was inspired by the murderous rampage of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate some fifteen years earlier, there are striking similarities between this film and real life events.

With sweeping vistas and an eclectic soundtrack (including Carl Orff’s Gassenhauer), viewers are taken to a middle America that many of us did not know even existed. The use of Spacek’s voiceovers furnishes the pseudo-documentary style that director Malick had clearly intended for this film. The trivialization of death seems now to be old hat for the film industry but forty years ago, this was a breakthrough concept picture and a major career launcher for both Sheen and Spacek.

Video Quality

[Rating:3.5/5]

Perhaps not the last word in clarity, the restoration of this film, using 4K resolution is pretty remarkable. Noise and dirt were removed with MTT’s DRS, Pixel Farms’s PFClean, and Image System’s Phoenix. The use of panoramic landscape is so effective that one gets the continuing impression of being in a larger than life art gallery.

Audio Quality

[Rating:3.5/5]

Remastering of the original monaural soundtrack was performed at 24 bits with ProTools HD and an AudioCube workstation reduced the crackle. The results are not just listenable but crystal clear.

Essay booklet with a terrific piece on Badlands written by writer/director Michael Almereyda.

The Definitive Word

Overall:

[Rating:4.5/5]

There is a short list of films that are simply mesmerizing and Badlands belongs on that list. Martin Sheen, a brilliant film actor if there ever was one, gives a masterful performance and, to the end, makes you believe in the unbelievable–that he would actually get away with it all: “I just always wanted to be a criminal, not this big a one.” While we now take celebrity in mass murder for granted, this subject is glorified for one of the first times in this film. At the end, Malick leaves us with the rather sick fascination with this picture’s subject matter. There is an art to making films with economy of expression and letting viewers fill in the blanks. Writer/director/producer Malick, in his relatively limited body of work, has absolutely mastered this art. Badlands, forty years later, remains a captivating and essential watch.